iculties also for
Milton's poem. Yet no reader of _Paradise Lost_ is found to complain that
the poem is lacking in poetic ornament. Milton has successfully
surmounted or evaded many of this formidable catalogue of limitations,
without the sacrifice of dramatic propriety. It is true that in the
course of their morning orisons, addressed to their Maker, Adam and Eve
apostrophise the Mists and Exhalations--

that now rise
From hill or steaming lake, dusky or gray,
Till the sun paint your fleecy skirts with gold;

--where, a purist might urge, neither of them had any right to be
acquainted with paint, or skirts, or gold. But anachronisms like these
are, after all, only a part of the great anachronism, or postulate
rather, whereby Adam and Eve are made to speak the English tongue. In the
Twelfth Book Michael is guilty of a graver lapse where he mentions
baptism without explanation or apology. On the other hand, Raphael, who
had a pleasanter occasion and more time for his retrospective summary,
explains the military manoeuvring of angels by what Adam had already seen
of the flight of birds, and after describing the great war in Heaven and
the fierce hosting of the opposed forces, ventures, at a later point in
his story, to illustrate the flowing together of the congregated waters
at the Creation by a simile drawn, with apology, from the massing of
troops:--

As armies at the call
Of trumpet (for of armies thou hast heard)
Troop to their standard, so the watery throng,
Wave rolling after wave.

In the main Milton studies propriety with regard to the forbidden matters
enumerated by Andreini. But he escapes from the full effect of the
prohibition by a variety of devices. In the first place, there are the
two chief episodes of the poem; Raphael's narration, from the Fifth to
the Eighth Book, imparted to Adam as a warning against impending dangers,
and conveying an account of the history of the Universe before the
Creation of Man; and Michael's narration, in the Eleventh and Twelfth
Books, consoling and strengthening Adam, before the Expulsion from the
Garden, by a rapid survey of the prospective history of the World from
that event down to the Millennium. Considered as a narrator, Michael is
very subject to dullness; were it not for the unfailing dignity and
magniloquence of his diction, his tale would be merely a bleak compendium
of the outlines of Scripture history;